High up in the Carpathian mountains, a forest guard named Csaba Demeter was leaving the woods one evening early this summer when a brown bear attacked him from behind. It pinned him to the ground, sunk its teeth into his limbs and tore deep lacerations into his back with its claws. Demeter pulled his coat over his head and played dead, holding his breath and stiffening his limbs as the bear dug into his flesh. It was five minutes before the animal gave up and moved slowly back into the forest, leaving Demeter barely alive on the mountainside.

Csaba Demeter, the forest guard who was attacked by a bear earlier this year. Photograph: Luke Dale-Harris

By the time he spoke to the Guardian in autumn, Demeter had already told his story many times to journalists, who had published it to thousands of readers across rural Romania. It is not that his story is particularly unique – bear attacks are relatively common in Romania, and a couple of years ago it would barely have made local news. But in recent months the attitude towards bears has changed, and the appetite for stories of attacks has risen dramatically.

It’s only when you leave Romania’s fast-developing cities and head into the remote reaches of Transylvania that it begins to become apparent what this might mean. In the small, communist-era towns that greet the foothills of the Carpathians, crowds gather to hear politicians talk of retribution against “problem bears” and promise political action to deal with the animals. Further into the hills, in dozens of remote villages that sit sealed off from the world by thick forest, people have begun to take the situation into their own hands, trading recipes for homemade poisons designed to kill a bear.

The ideal poison contains something sweet and pungent to attract the animal’s attention, mixed with chemicals strong enough to kill an animal of 300kg and is slow-acting enough to ensure that it is many miles away before it finally collapses. Of the many villagers spoken to by the Guardian, all saw killing bears as a necessity. The government, they say, has abandoned them to fend for themselves, and the bears are a threat that can’t be ignored.

More than 6,000 brown bears are believed to live in Romania, spread unevenly along the country’s 500-mile mountain range. For more than 25 years following the fall of communism in 1989, management of the animals was left to hundreds of regional hunting associations. Each year, the associations would put forward a total number of bears in their area, as well as a number for those considered to be dangerous to humans. From this, a quota would be drawn for each hunting association, who would then auction off the opportunity to hunt “problem bears” to private hunting companies catering to hunters from all over the world.

The annual bear dance is performed to drive away evil spirits and to bring good luck in the new year. Photograph: Bogdan Cristel/EPA

Then, last October, the Romanian government made a surprise decision to ban the hunting of bears and other large carnivores altogether. The environmental minister, Cristiana Pașca Palmer, a newly appointed, avowedly progressive politician largely at odds with her political surroundings, claimed that under European law “hunting for money was already illegal, but it was given a green light anyway.” The idea that hunting was acting to protect citizens from bears was, she claimed, just a cover for the hunting industry and based on nothing but pseudoscience. Conservationists across the world threw their hands together in applause.

The optimism was shortlived. In the 12 months since the ban, a movement calling for the widespread culling of bears has grown and gathered momentum, tipping the bear question over from political discussion into what the movement’s leader, Csaba Borboly, describes as “something like a war.” Borboly is president of Harghita county, a predominantly ethnic Hungarian region tucked into the foothills of Transylvania, an area of dense forest and precarious farmland in which people and carnivores have coexisted uneasily for centuries. It is here that the presence of bears is most keenly felt – almost everyone has a story to tell about the animals, from the woman who explains how in spring this year she woke up in the night to find a 200kg brown bear sniffing around her toilet, to the hundreds of farmers who approach the government each year for compensation over lost livestock and crops.

The village of Atid, where almost every household has a story about a bear attack and people do not let their children out after dark for fear of bears. In the foreground is a plot of maize. The day before, a third of the crop had been destroyed by bears. Photograph: Luke Dale-Harris

Borboly has risen to fame and power by promising to “restore the natural balance” between bears and people. He claims that in the 12 months since the hunting ban, the number of attacks on people, crops and livestock in the region has more than doubled, with 263 so far this year. He puts this down both to a huge rise in bear numbers caused by their status as a protected species, and “the genetic and behavioural deterioration” of bears that he claims results when they go unpunished for entering the human sphere. The numbers and scientific analysis are widely rejected by scientists in Romania and beyond, but in rural Romania it is Borboly’s voice that carries furthest.

“The government do nothing and the patience of the people is decreasing, therefore one takes justice into one’s own hands and bear traps and poisoning appear,” Borboly told the Guardian. Last year, he faced severe criticism after posting an article on his blog calling for “vigilante justice”, in which he offered “ideas” on how to kill a bear: “carbide in wax to burn the bear’s stomach, bread soaked in antifreeze, rat poison dipped in honey.”

After publication of this article, Borboly emailed the Guardian to state that his post had been misinterpreted. He said he condemns the self-righteousness of those suspected of poisoning wild bears with home-made poisons. He also criticised those who oppose a cull achieved through a legal hunting quota while turning a blind eye to illegal poisoning.

“It is hard to explain the level of influence that Borboly has developed in this region”, says Csaba Domokos, a bear specialist with wildlife protection NGO Milvus Group who works in the Harghita region. “When he says something, even if it is completely insane, you have to listen because you know that everyone else around here is.” Domokos points out that the image of a politician promising to protect their people from the “threat that lies over the hill” is a familiar to Hungarian voters. “I think he has taken some cues from Viktor Orbán [Hungary’s controversial anti-immigration prime minister]; find a common enemy and build it into a national obsession.”

“[Borboly] has convinced everyone in these rural regions that the only thing standing between them and total mayhem is hunters. Without hunting, he has helped encourage the belief that vigilante killing of bears is the only way for people to keep themselves and their children safe. And we don’t know where that ends. It’s not difficult to poison a bear or to snare a bear – we have seen snared bears regularly this year. And if this becomes normalised, which I fear it is becoming around here, then it can have serious effects on the population very quickly.”

Foraging bears on the streets of a town at night. Photograph: Nandor Veres/EPA

Less than 50 miles east of Harghita, past the mountains and down into the steep valleys ribboned with villages that lie beyond, the attitude towards bears is almost entirely different. Bears are still common here, and attacks remain a part of life for villagers. But few see hunting as the solution.

Although he shrugs of the suggestion, this is in part due to the work of Silviu Chiriac and a small group of biologists who have spent much of the last decade studying the effects of hunting on the behaviour of bears. Their conclusions match those of a number of similar studies done in other parts of the world. Where hunting is prevalent, the frequency of attacks increase, and bears are more prone to enter inhabited areas.

“Hunting is not the only cause of problems with bears, but it is an important element,” he says. “Hunters like to shoot the largest bears they can find, deep in the forest. This is basically a way of actively choosing the bears that are least likely to attack humans, the ones that never come into contact with civilisation.

“For thousands of years people have lived with carnivores here, and there has never been a war like you can see now in parts of Romania. We don’t have true wilderness here – not like in Alaska or Canada - so we need to find a way to live with bears that is acceptable to people in the modern day. It’s not easy, but unless we want to lose bears from our country I can’t see that we have a choice.”

• This article was amended on 27 November 2017 to include the response, received after publication, from Csaba Boboly.